Hi, my name is Charlie Bamforth. I'm the distinguished professor of malting and brewing sciences at the University of California, Davis, and I'll be your instructor for this course. They call me the Pope of foam, pretty sad, isn't it? But it's been reflection of the fact that I've been working on bubbles on beer for some 40 years. Recently they did a quiz at Heriot watt University in Edinburgh Scotland and they asked the question, who is the patron saint of beer? And some of the students wrote, Charlie Bamforth. But that's quite a leg up for me in the Pope of foam though, to the best of my knowledge, I have never carried out a miracle. I've been in the brewing industry since 1978. And the reason I joined the brewing industry is because it was the first permanent job that I saw advertised in the pages of the new scientist magazine. I'd done my PhD in biochemistry and I was a postdoc at the University of Sheffield in Northern England. And when you're a post doc, you spend your first year beavering away, doing a lot of science, in the second year you look at the job advertisements for a permanent job. And the first one that caught my eye was at the Brewing Research Foundation, which is an organization in Surrey, just south of London in England, that was doing research for the whole of the brewing industry, particularly that in the UK. And it was paid for by a tax on beer, every drop of beer that was brewed in the UK had tax on it that went to BRF to pay for research. I was at BRF for five years, went through the system, and the biggest pay masses of BRF was the Bass Brewing Company. The legendary Bass Brewing Company with the famous Red Triangle and they recruited me, they stole me away if you like from BRF, to in due course become the research manager of the company based in Burton on Trent in England. And then after five years doing that they decided I needed the smooth edges knocking off and I had to get some street cred. And so I was seconded to the Preston Brook Brewery of Bass to become the quality assurance manager. I did that for a couple of years before going back to BRF and we became BRF International. They're doing a lot of work all over the globe for companies who were interested in the fundamental science and technology of brewing. Around that time I also became a visiting professor at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. And so when they wanted a professor of brewing science at UC Davis, they wanted somebody who had got research record, who had been in industry, and somebody who had been in academia. So here I am, said I can do that and thus I came to UC Davis for my next teaching experience in 1999. These days I'm also an honorary professor at Nottingham University in England. So I have a lot of experience teaching people about beer and brewing. And of course for research more than 40 years, not only researching foam, but also freshness, flavor, clarity of beer, color of beer and much more besides, experience that I hope is going to come to bear in this series of courses that I hope you will all enjoy. I do have some patterns that feature beer including one on using egg white to put a head on beer. I don't think anybody is actively taking advantage of that pattern. I've published hundreds and hundreds of papers and books on beer, but actually not many people realize this, I've published a lot more on soccer or football as I prefer to call it. And I've been writing about soccer as a part time activity you might say for more than 30 years. So the world of brewing is a wonderful place, I've been all over the world, talking about beer, explaining and solving problems of people all over the world. I've been to all the major brewing centers including the biggest, which of course is China, but also growing places in terms of brewing, places like India, Brazil, Thailand. I've been to places like Saudi Arabia, talking about alcohol free beer, and many many more. I have to say that all the places that I go to to talk about beer and to exchange friendships, then probably my favorite is going down to the antipodes to Australia and new Zealand. We have a lot of fun, but we have a lot of fun everywhere. And it's great to be a brewing scientist and to being as part of just a wonderful industry. So more than 40 years of experience in the brewing industry, experience that I'm sure lends itself well to presenting these courses to you on the quality of beer.
